Adolphus Busch (1839-1913)

Adolphus Busch arrived in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1857 as an unknown immigrant from German-speaking Europe. After partnering with Eberhard Anheuser in an existing brewery in 1865, Busch transformed the operation, eventually known as the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association, into the largest brewery in the world within a quarter of a century.

Adolphus
Busch (born July 10, 1839 in Kastel, Hesse-Darmstadt; died October 10, 1913 in
Bad Schwalbach, Germany) arrived in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1857 as an unknown
immigrant from German-speaking Europe. After partnering with Eberhard Anheuser
in an existing brewery in 1865, Busch transformed the operation, eventually
known as the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association, into the largest brewery in
the world within a quarter of a century. Key to the eventual rise of
Anheuser-Busch was the timely adoption of important scientific and
technological innovations, an expansive sales strategy geared largely toward
external domestic and international population centers, and a pioneering integrated
marketing plan that focused on a single core brand, Budweiser, making it the
most successful nationally-distributed beer of the pre-Prohibition era. Busch
was able to lay the groundwork for his success by cultivating and catering to
the extensive German-American population of St. Louis. As a primary Midwestern
destination for German immigrants during the mid-nineteenth century, the city
grew under their influence from 16,469 residents in 1840 to 451,770 a
half-century later.[1]
In this city, a ready-made market for lager beer played to the strengths of
Busch’s entrepreneurial spirit and encouraged the formulation of a farsighted
vision of how beer could be made and sold beyond traditional local boundaries –
most importantly, by utilizing the emerging national rail network and innovations
in refrigeration to ship beer from St. Louis to distant markets.

The
success of the Anheuser-Busch brewery meant that Adolphus Busch could pursue a
lavish lifestyle rivaling that of Old World royalty. Several mansions, in
California and New York as well as in St. Louis, were needed to maintain his collection
of furniture and fine art, and to guarantee an opulent lifestyle for his family.
A personal railcar, the Adolphus,
transported Busch to preferred destinations across the nation, and a private
spur line was built to bring the coach virtually to the back door of One Busch
Place, his main family residence in St. Louis.[2] Busch
also donated millions to charitable causes both inside and outside of the German-American
community and gave small but not inexpensive gifts to individuals with whom he
crossed paths, in part to impress them with the wealth and success he had
attained in the New World. Throughout his life, Busch made frequent return
trips to his German homeland, where he maintained the ethnic bonds that defined
much of his character.

Ultimately,
Busch became one of the most high-profile German immigrants of the nineteenth
century and the most successful German-American brewer baron nationwide. Upon
his death, he had an estate valued at up to $60 million (approximately $1.36
billion in 2010),[3]
substantial holdings in several companies other than Anheuser-Busch, and a
lengthy list of beneficiaries who gained from his propensity to give both time
and money to community-minded endeavors. Although never a member of St. Louis
high society, Adolphus was lauded after his death as the city’s foremost
ambassador, its best-known entrepreneur. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in Busch’s passing, the world “lost a
singular example of successful enterprise coupled with high integrity.” “St.
Louis,” the paper continued, “lost a big private citizen actively identified
with a half century of its growth and thousands of men and women and children
have lost a good friend.”[4]

The
birth of Adolphus Busch on July 10, 1839, in Kastel, Hesse, was announced to
the public the next day by his father, Ulrich, during a visit to the city’s
mayor.[5] The
formality of the gesture spoke to the societal standing of Ulrich, an elder lord
of the Rhine River city. Adolphus was the twenty-first of twenty-two children
fathered by Ulrich with two wives: his first wife, Catharina, bore five boys
and two girls before her death on April 16, 1815, while his second wife, Barbara,
gave birth to eight boys and seven girls before passing away on March 12, 1844.
By the end of the 1830s, Ulrich Busch had established himself as an influential
member of the German merchant class, with substantial financial holdings
derived from lumber harvested on his extensive wooded property, a successful
inn and tavern operation, and real estate interests including vineyards, some
of which had been cultivated for as long as two thousand years.[6] A
strong sense of traditional values shaped the upbringing of Adolphus and the
other Busch children, and the family placed particular emphasis on discipline,
thrift, loyalty, and hard work. It should be added, however, that these values
were cultivated alongside practices that stressed Rhineland conviviality. For
instance, one proverb governing the Busch home maintained that “eating and
drinking hold body and soul together.” The Busch family’s three-story mansion,
the Schützenhof, was located in a prolific wine-growing region, and drink
culture, in general, and vinous spirits, in particular, played an important
role in Adolphus’ early life and continued to shape his later years as well.
Although he went on to become one of the most successful brewery owners in
history, Busch always maintained a preference for wine over beer when it came to
his own consumption.

Ulrich
Busch’s economic success guaranteed superior schooling for young Adolphus. After
receiving his elementary education in Mainz and Darmstadt, Adolphus attended
school in Brussels, where he studied French and English among other subjects. To
gain work experience, the younger Busch eventually took up employment in his
father’s lumber enterprise, rafting logs down the Rhine and Main rivers. He
also served briefly as an apprentice at a brewery belonging to an uncle. After Ulrich
Busch died at age seventy-two in July 1852, Adolphus was forced to chart his
own course in life and to channel his energies into more enduring business
ventures. In 1856, at just seventeen years of age, he began working as a
shipping clerk at a mercantile house in Cologne. Although he only remained in
this position for a year, the experience proved formative for Busch: it was
there, in Cologne, that he developed the skills and character traits (e.g.,
energy, enthusiasm, an eye for opportunity) needed to realize his existing ambition
to make money and accrue wealth. His desire to maximize his own potential, the
unlikelihood of his inheriting a substantial portion of his father’s estate as
the second-youngest son, and favorable reports about immigrant life in the
United States from his brothers George, Ulrich, and John, prompted Adolphus to
leave Europe in 1857 and take up residence in America.[7] Although
Busch chose to make America his new homeland, his journey was by no means a final
farewell to the Old Country. In the coming years, Busch took many trips to
Europe, generally, and to Germany, specifically, including more than twenty
trips to his former hometown.[8]

After
arriving at port in New Orleans, eighteen-year-old Adolphus made his way to the
American Midwest, where he found a hospitable environment both personally and
professionally. Among his brothers, George had already established a thriving
enterprise as a hop merchant, while John, who came to America in 1849, had founded
a brewing operation in Washington, Missouri, in 1854. Fifty miles to the east,
St. Louis beckoned Adolphus as a rapidly emerging German settlement that was
well on its way to becoming part of the famed “German Quadrangle,” an area that
also included Cincinnati and Milwaukee, among other cities. Busch thrived on
the immigrant culture that pervaded St. Louis, and he quickly realized that the
knowledge, habits, and skills he had acquired in his Rhineland youth could help
him make the most of certain business opportunities that were typical of river
cities everywhere. Adolphus found early employment as a “mud clerk” and was
tasked with assessing cargo aboard incoming Mississippi River steamships. Possessed
of a keen eye, he also pursued private opportunities to buy and sell the
commodities that these ships carried. Whereas many German immigrants of the era
maintained a hardscrabble existence until becoming established, a “substantial
allowance” of family money allowed Adolphus to enjoy a brief period of acclimation
before getting to work. As he acknowledged later in life, his initial weeks in
St. Louis were not given over to intense labor so much as to “hunting, loafing,
getting acquainted and having a good time.”[9]

To
amass additional financial resources, Busch worked briefly at a St. Louis supply
house owned by William Heinrichshofen. Thereafter, he used his earnings and
existing funds to enter into a partnership with Ernst Wattenberg to sell
brewing supplies. The new firm – Wattenberg, Busch & Company – was ideally
situated in both time and place for success. The rapid rise in German
immigration to St. Louis had spurred a population explosion: within a decade,
the city’s population had more than doubled, going from 78,000 residents in 1850
to 185,000 in 1860. Many of these newcomers brought with them a taste for a
relatively new style of beer – lager –which originated during the 1830s in Central
Europe. The brew got its distinct character from a special bottom-fermenting
strain of yeast that yielded a smoother, crisper, more refreshing flavor than
traditional top-fermented ales. The unique taste also resulted from an extended
aging and maturation period in a cool, subterranean environment. The spread of
lager beer saw a marked increase in the number of St. Louis breweries that were
eager and willing to serve a clientele accustomed to consuming copious
quantities of the beverage, from twenty-four in 1854 to forty just six years
later, thirty-two of which were owned and operated by individuals of German
stock.[10] Abundant
natural resources also played a vital role in St. Louis’ blossoming brewing
trade, which benefited from an ample supply of quality water nearby in the
Mississippi and Missouri rivers and from suitable hills for caverns for aging lager
beer. During the hot summer of 1860, thirsty German-Americans and other
residents of St. Louis combined to imbibe 212,000 barrels of beer, generating
$1.5 million in revenue (approximately $40.6 million in 2010) for the brewer
barons who spent one dollar to manufacture each barrel that they then sold for as
much as eight dollars to area tavern keepers.

One
enterprising brewer of this era was Eberhard Anheuser, a St. Louis resident and
German immigrant who had used his profits from a prosperous soap manufacturing
business to purchase the struggling Bavarian Brewery (soon renamed the Bavarian
Brewery, E. Anheuser & Co.) in 1860. At the time, the Bavarian Brewery was
fortunate in being able to market to a large number of German and Central
European immigrants. This advantage, however, was more than offset by the
competition that had been unleashed by the recent spike in the number of St.
Louis brewers. Even more importantly, though, the Bavarian Brewery faced an
extremely fundamental problem: by all accounts, its beer was mediocre, a major
handicap in a city filled with experienced lager consumers and no lack of brewers
who produced a consistently superior product. But if Anheuser was burdened by
the challenges associated with running an underachieving brewery, the venture
remained profitable for Busch, who continued providing the company with brewing
supplies from his office, which was located right around the corner from the
Anheuser soap works.

It
soon became clear that Anheuser’s brewery wasn’t the only thing that had
captured Adolphus’ attention. As he became better acquainted with the firm and
with Eberhard Anheuser personally, Busch also became increasingly attracted to
his sixteen-year-old daughter, Elisa, known among friends as Lilly or even “the
curly head” [der Lockenkopf] in
reference to the prominent blond curls in her hair.[11] After
a period of courtship, Busch proposed to Lilly. His offer was accepted, and the
wedding was set for March 7, 1861 – three days after the inauguration of
Abraham Lincoln – at the Holy Ghost German Evangelical Lutheran Church. The
service was particularly memorable insofar as it represented the marriage of
more than one Anheuser and Busch: for some time, Adolphus’ older brother,
Ulrich, had been dating another daughter of Anheuser, Anna, and during the
service Ulrich and Anna were wed as well. The double wedding, unique as it was,
did not come off entirely without incident, as Adolphus arrived twenty minutes
late, citing the need to close an important business deal beforehand.[12]

The marriage between Adolphus and Lilly was scarcely a month old when the reality
of a nation at war took priority. After the fall of Fort Sumter on April 12,
1861, Busch, along with his father-in-law, willingly took up arms to help keep
Missouri from coming under Confederate control. Ultimately, Busch spent three months
as a corporal in Company E of the 3rd Regiment of the U.S. Reserve Corps. He
served alongside some 5,000 volunteers and 1,200 reservists, including Eberhard
Anheuser, who was also a corporal in Charlie Company.[13] By
the time the enlistments of the homeguard had expired in August 1861, both
Anheuser and Busch had reprised their normal personal and professional roles. For
Adolphus, that meant a return to work in the brewery supply business, as well
as the beginning of what would become a sizeable family. After taking in
Gustava von Kliehr, the orphaned daughter of one of Lilly’s sisters, Lilly
herself gave birth to their first child, a girl, Nellie, on April 12, 1863. By
the end of 1865, she had given birth to two sons as well: Edward, born in 1864,
and August A., born four days after Christmas in 1865. Over the next eleven
years, Lily gave birth to eight more Busch children: Adolphus Jr. (1868),
Alexis (1869), Emilie (1870), Edmee (1871), Peter (1872), Martha (1873), Anna
(1875), and Clara (1876), although three of the girls – Emilie, Alexis, and
Martha – died shortly after birth.[14] With
the goal of male heirs and potential future business leaders attained, Adolphus
focused more intently on entrepreneurial matters and sought out opportunities
that, unbeknownst to him at the time, would make him one of the wealthiest and
most admired industrialists in the United States by the end of the century.

The
end of the Civil War marked a turning point in the life of Adolphus Busch,
particularly when it came to the professional endeavors that would eventually
define him. During the war years, Busch was one of the relatively few St. Louis
businessmen who braved the uncertainty of the era and took a chance on dealing
in cotton and other Southern products. Through the skillful and efficient
buying and selling of commodities, Busch earned substantial profits and positioned
himself to invest in other commercial ventures when peace returned to the
nation. In 1865, the year the war ended, Busch acquired a stake in the Bavarian
Brewery by buying out the interests of Eberhard Anheuser’s then-partner,
William D’Oench.[15]
As Anheuser’s new partner for the future, Busch devoted himself to improving
the fortunes of the company. To learn as much as possible about the brewing
process, Busch read industry journals and other brewery-oriented publications
whenever he could, and from 1868 onward he made frequent trips to German-speaking
Europe to study brewing techniques and technical innovations, in the hopes of gaining
an advantage over his local competitors.

Although
Busch had no hands-on experience as a brewer, he had a basic general knowledge
of the brewing industry, years of commercial experience, and innate business
instincts – all of which he put to good use. He quickly gained a reputation as
an adept salesman who “sold the bad almost as facilely as he sold the good.”[16] No
less important was Adolphus’ attitude toward hard work, which he saw as “pleasure
and agreeable recreation,” whose payoff, beyond financial reward, was the satisfaction
he felt when his efforts were “crowned with success.”[17]
To improve business, Busch seized upon various gimmicks designed to give the
brewery and its product greater exposure. Mindful that name recognition was critical
in a crowded marketplace, he believed that any publicity, good or bad, was
better than no publicity. By giving free beer to customers, paying
saloonkeepers to stock Anheuser and Busch brews instead of competitors’ beer,
and sending agents to existing draft accounts to buy free rounds for patrons,
Adolphus put his product in the public eye, building an awareness of his beer
that would persist for years to come.

In
1865, the year that Busch bought his way into the Bavarian Brewery, the firm was
struggling to manufacture and sell 4,000 barrels of beer per year.[18] Undeterred
by the company’s problems, Busch surveyed the business climate and noticed a
unique set of circumstances that promised to support the successful operation
of a brewing enterprise on an unprecedented scale. First, the dramatic growth
of the German immigrant population had created an enormously expanded customer
base, and, as importantly, a ready supply of inexpensive but capable labor.
Second, the advent of the Industrial Age promised new technology that would
revolutionize breweries and make them more cost-effective to operate every
year. Third, new transportation networks, most notably railroads, opened up distant
markets and allowed beer to be shipped farther, and faster, than ever before. Fourth,
government regulation was in its infancy and thus promised few impediments to
profit-taking and reinvestment in the business.[19] At
the time, beer brewing seemed to offer unlimited potential to virtually anyone
with ambition and energy; the challenge, however, was finding the means to ensure
success.

As
a first step toward expansion, Busch sought financial backing from a group of
prominent French bankers in St. Louis, but was rejected for a $50,000 loan (approximately
$690,000 in 2010). Apparently, Busch – whose office already possessed a level
of opulence out of keeping with his business’ limited success[20] –
was deemed too extravagant and thus a poor risk as a money manager. So Busch
went elsewhere and secured the requisite loan from State Bank president Robert
A. Barnes. With an extended line of credit, Busch commenced construction of a
new brew house, a malt house, and additional storage cellars. The addition boosted
the brewery’s capacity to 25,000 barrels per year. The investment proved wise: Bavarian
Brewery beer production grew by 300 percent between 1865 and 1870.[21]

But Busch realized that unless the quality
of the Anheuser and Busch beverages could be greatly improved, the expansion
would only result in the production of greater volumes of subpar beer. To
address this problem, Adolphus took a series of trips to Europe, where he
stopped in Paris, Bohemia, and Bavaria. He benefitted from private guided tours
of numerous breweries and gained much useful knowledge through first-hand
observation of important innovations that had yet to reach the United States. Busch’s
improved understanding of the brewing process, together with the hiring of
greater numbers of skilled brewmasters, helped the company’s beers achieve the
desired level of quality. More important, still, was the company’s introduction
of pasteurization, a process whereby finished beer slated for bottling and
shipping to external markets was subjected to heat in order to kill harmful
bacteria that caused spoilage. During a trip abroad, the marketing-minded Busch
had taken note of the scientific advances made by Louis Pasteur in the area of
wine stabilization, and he returned to Missouri with the idea of applying them
to his bottled beer trade.[22]

The introduction of pasteurization was part
of Busch’s plan to circumvent St. Louis’ intense local competition by shipping
his beer to ever-distant markets with greater sales potential. In 1872, after becoming
the first brewer in the United States to produce pasteurized bottled beer,
Busch was poised to take the lead in the race among brewers to tap into the increasingly
lucrative southern and western markets. Bolstered by the establishment of
icehouses and warehouses strategically placed along key railroad lines, the
company enjoyed significant business growth during the 1870s, boosting its beer
output to 44,961 barrels by the end of 1877 – a production level that transformed
this once-miniscule operation into the thirty-second-largest brewer in the
nation. In 1882, in recognition of this achievement, industry observers dubbed Adolphus
Busch the “father” of lager beer bottling. In truth, bottled beer had existed for
over a century, and its national market share, at less than ten percent, was
tiny in comparison with draft beer as sold by the tavern trade. For his part, Busch
was not shy about taking credit for his innovations. In a brewery promotional pamphlet
dating from around 1887, he claimed that Anheuser-Busch could “point with
honest pride to the marvelous change wrought by it in a few short years by
virtually creating a new and important industry, a source of national wealth,
giving employment to many thousand citizens, and proving the main factor in
stimulating and developing the manufacture of bottles, corks, labels, wires,
etc., to such extensive dimensions as the most sanguine and hopeful never
dreamed of.”[23]

During
the 1870s, Adolphus Busch began to reap the personal rewards of his business success.
In 1873, he became a full partner in the brewery, which in 1875 was renamed the
E. Anheuser Co.’s Brewing Association.[24] The
brewery was incorporated that same year, with 480 shares of stock issued at a
value of $240,000 (approximately $4.92 million in 2010). As president of the
company, Eberhard Anheuser received 140 of them, with another 100 held in trust
for his daughter Lilly and, by extension, Adolphus. Brewmaster Erwin Spraul
held two shares in honor of his vital role in the business, but the remaining
238 – just slightly under an outright majority – went to Adolphus in
recognition of the services he had rendered in the past and his potential for leadership
in the future.[25]
That the firm’s future would ultimately depend on Busch was obvious to insiders
and outsiders alike. For example, in 1878, a group of local commentators
described Adolphus Busch and his rapid rise to prominence within St. Louis
business circles:

Mr.
Busch, who is the representative head of the Anheuser Brewing Company, is a
comparatively young man and a gentleman of the most affable disposition, but
his ability as a business man ranks as high as that of any in St. Louis. He not
only thoroughly understands the brewing business, but also combines a practical
and original knowledge which, in its utility, places him in the advance of his
competitors, and makes them his imitators. He has entire control of the
brewery, directs its business, makes all the contracts, handles its funds and
carries all its responsibilities on his own shoulders. The success of his
management … ranks him among the best commercial men of the West.[26]

In
1879, the name of the company was changed to the Anheuser-Busch Brewing
Association in honor of Adolphus’ contributions to the firm, and any remaining
questions about the power structure at the brewery were settled on May 2, 1880,
when Anheuser passed away after a three-year illness. His stock shares were transferred
to his five surviving children, but none of them was suited to a position of
responsibility at the brewery. With the additional shares that accrued to
Lilly, Adolphus Busch obtained full control of the company, and for the next
128 years, Anheuser-Busch remained firmly within the Busch family.[27]

Steadily
increasing beer sales gave Busch the freedom to improve and expand the physical
structure of the brewery, which he did, knowing that reinvesting a substantial
portion of the company’s profits would lead to an even greater return later on.
Faced with a brew house that was functionally obsolete relative to the expansive
goals of the firm, Adolphus approved the construction of a new facility that
was capable of significantly higher production. With an eye toward public
relations, he settled upon a design resembling a castle. Large and imposing on the
outside, the facility possessed an interior opulence that partially belied its
industrial purposes and conveyed a grandiose impression of importance and
authority. Busch also ordered the construction of a bottling plant that soon
produced 100,000 bottles per day, the largest capacity in the nation. Another
significant improvement to the physical plant was the addition of an ice house
featuring a mechanized refrigeration system, one of the first in the nation to
be installed on such a large scale. It was an expensive venture, but Busch correctly
foresaw the advantages of artificial cooling. Buildings outfitted with such
equipment freed the brewery from using caves, with their limited space, for
aging and storing lager beer for extended periods. Likewise, mechanized
refrigeration spared the brewery the trouble and expense of harvesting, shipping,
and storing large, unwieldy chunks of ice. Construction and maintenance costs
were reduced, and more accurate temperature levels could be achieved, allowing
for better quality control within the brewery setting.[28] In
1876, Busch expanded his use of artificial cooling through the purchase of five
refrigerated railcars for export shipments, the first such fleet of
refrigerated shipping units for beer in the nation.[29] Up
to that point, “refrigeration” usually entailed packing ice blocks into boxcars
– a process that sometimes left perishable meats and dairy products
insufficiently chilled and often rotted the wooden floors over time, leading to
higher maintenance and replacement costs. In the new Busch cars, however, ice
and other coolants such as ammonia were stored in special containers and
tubing, which meant that the refrigeration was both more uniform and
longer-lasting for extended trips to distant markets. The idea proved highly
successful: by the end of the next year, Busch operated forty refrigerated railcars,
and by 1888 the fleet had expanded to 850.[30]

At
the same time that Busch acquired his first refrigerated rail cars, the beer
that would revolutionize the fortunes of the brewery – and, by extension, the
entire American brewing industry – was added to the company product line.[31] At
the beginning of 1876, the E. Anheuser Co.’s Brewing Association marketed
sixteen different beers, including Standard, Pilsener, Pale Lager, Burgundy,
Liebotschaner, Erlanger, and Faust, the last being named after Tony Faust, a
St. Louis saloonkeeper and personal friend of Eberhard Anheuser in the 1850s. None
was able to occupy a distinct niche in the marketplace – and to a certain
extent, they actually cut into each other’s sales and prevented the development
of a comprehensive marketing effort geared toward a single dominant brand. In
search of a distinctive beer that would achieve widespread public appeal, Busch
looked toward Central Europe to a brewing style that he had come to know in the
course of his travels. For years, Bohemian brewers had produced Pilsener beer, as
crafted in the city of Pilsen. Made with the region’s characteristically soft
water and with specially-chosen area grains and hops, Pilsener was carefully
aged in cool underground cellars that allowed for kräusening, a secondary fermentation process that naturally
carbonated the beer. The result was a crisp, clean, lightly bitter brew of refreshing
and pleasing character. During a trip to the region with his good friend, the liquor
importer/bottler Carl Conrad, one particular brand caught Adolphus Busch’s
attention: Budweiser, which was made by a brewery in the town after which it
was named – Budweis – approximately sixty-five miles south of Pilsen. The beer
was sold in many parts of German-speaking Europe and even on a limited basis in
the United States, where it was marketed in New York on import under the
Budweiser moniker.

Back
in America, later in 1876, Conrad contracted with the E. Anheuser & Company
brewery to make and sell Budweiser for his distribution as an upscale product.
They decided to package it for shipment in bottles with foil covering a
wire-wrapped cork closure, the idea being to invoke the image of fine
champagne. They also used the most desirable ingredients they could procure to
brew it. The result, according to Busch, was a “very pale, fine beer, paler
than in ordinary use and made from German malt and hops.”[32]
Marketing played a key role in establishing the brand, with Busch choosing the
name Budweiser because of its familiarity to native speakers of German but also
because of its ease of pronunciation for non-Germans. Thus, the name was chosen
to appeal to German immigrants, native-born Americans, and immigrants from
other countries.[33]
Recognition came quickly for the brand, which was referred to early on as the “world
renowned Conrad’s Budweiser Beer” and was shipped from its St. Louis base of
manufacture to restaurants as far away as Denver and New York. In its first
year of production, Budweiser sales amounted to 225,342 bottles, a figure that
grew tenfold to 2.3 million bottles in 1880.[34]

Despite
Budweiser’s success, by the end of 1882, Conrad was facing severe financial
difficulties and had to declare bankruptcy; among his outstanding debts was
$94,000 (approximately $2.07 million in 2010), payable to the Anheuser-Busch
Brewing Association. Keenly aware of the business opportunity in front of him,
Busch negotiated the acquisition of the Budweiser brand from Conrad, under the
premise that the Budweiser name and the established reputation of the product
far outweighed the debt that he owed to the brewery.[35] It
would prove to be one of the most foresighted transactions in American business
history: in Budweiser, Busch obtained the signature brand that catapulted his
brewery to national dominance and international fame.[36]

Bolstered
by Budweiser’s initial success, Busch focused his attention on marketing both
it and the brewery to a wider audience. The effort to establish a corporate
identity had already been launched a decade earlier, in 1872, when the company
introduced the Anheuser-Busch logo, an intertwined A and eagle.[37]
In the early 1880s, Adolphus Busch put together a four-pronged strategy to make
Budweiser the most celebrated beer in the nation. First, Busch planned to
distribute traditional, saloon-based point-of-sale advertisements on a massive
scale. As part of this, he aimed to produce first-rate advertisements, and he
succeeded in achieving a level of quality – and cost – unheard of among most brewers.
Second, Busch planned to hire and dispatch a large group of trained and
motivated salesmen, each of whom would represent a specific territory under the
supervision of regional managers and would work closely with local
distributors. Third, in addition to the customary promotional posters and
printed matter, Busch planned to outfit his salesmen with small but innovative
giveaway items – most notably an Anheuser-Busch combination pocketknife/corkscrew
with a small peephole directing the viewer’s gaze to a likeness of Busch
himself. The idea was to make the Budweiser name more memorable to those who
encountered it. Fourth, he focused on mass-saturation advertising in the media
outlets of the day, including magazines, newspapers, literary journals,
playbills, and billboards across the country.[38] The
ultimate purpose of these efforts was to ensure that there was virtually no
important place in the United States where the Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser
names were not on prominent display on a nearly constant basis.[39]

While
Busch maintained cordial relations with other St. Louis brewers, few of whom presented
any serious threat to his business supremacy in the area, his dealings with out-of-town
brewers occasionally assumed a less congenial tone.[40] In
some cases, practicality governed their relations and helped keep the peace –
as, for instance, during the 1880s, when Busch contacted Milwaukee beer magnate
Frederick Pabst on multiple occasions to suggest fixing beer prices within the
saloon trade (a legal activity at the time) in an attempt to ensure healthy
profits and to prevent saloonkeepers from playing the brewers off against each
other. But outside of major urban centers, particularly in Midwestern regions
and in rural areas and smaller towns and cities with fewer breweries and less
competition, the story was different. For example, a less than amicable
arrangement marked the end of one economic disagreement in New Orleans, where
local breweries engaged in a price war to the detriment of Anheuser-Busch
products there. When the local brewers eventually upped their prices, believing
that the external competition had been tamed, Adolphus cut the price of his
beers, and continued to do so until the locals capitulated and agreed to
Busch’s demand that he alone would determine the price of beer in the city for
the next two decades.[41] On
other occasions, Busch opted to forego negotiations and simply acquired
breweries of strategic interest to him. Through his early rail shipping
activity, Busch had already built up a strong presence in Texas in the 1880s,
and by the end of the nineteenth century, he had managed to obtain an interest
in the Lone Star Brewing Company of San Antonio[42]
and the Texas Brewing Company in Fort Worth. Then, in 1895, Busch purchased
another San Antonio operation, the Alamo Brewery, with plans to close it in
order to minimize Lone Star’s competition in the city and the southern part of
the state.[43]

Vertical
integration was essential to Anheuser-Busch’s ability to maximize profits and
streamline its production process, and company possession of many of its own subsidiary operations translated into considerable cost savings for the brewery
over time. After launching the first fleet of refrigerated rail cars in 1876,
Busch founded the St. Louis-based Refrigerator Car Company a few years later.
The company manufactured units for its parent firm as well as other brewers and
interested businesses. In 1887, Adolphus established the Manufacturers Railway
Company to address the need to switch brewery boxcars from spur tracks to the
main rail lines used for export shipments. Over time, Busch also established an
on-site malt house to process the grain needed for brewing, created the
Adolphus Busch Glass Manufacturing Company to make the bottles that he needed
to ship to distant markets, and launched a similar firm to make the wooden
barrels required for unpasteurized draft beer.[44]

Well
before the end of the nineteenth century, Adolphus Busch’s expansive sales
strategies, innovative promotional efforts, and systematic expansion of the
Anheuser-Busch network of businesses helped his brewery achieve a level of
growth largely unmatched by his rivals.[45] Over
a six-year period beginning in 1875, production and distribution rose over sixfold:
from 31,545 barrels per year in 1875 to 44,961 in 1877; then to 105,234 barrels
in 1879; and finally to over 200,000 barrels in 1881. Another six years of
growth took the company to 456,511 barrels in 1887, making it the largest beer
producer in the world at the time. Production only continued rising, reaching
702,075 barrels in 1890.[46] A
quarter-century after purchasing an interest in the struggling Bavarian Brewery,
Busch had managed to transform a small, locally-oriented operation into a
multifaceted corporation with name and brand recognition across the United
States and in dozens of other countries.

During
the 1880s, the level of prosperity attained by Busch increasingly influenced
his private life: eager to impress upon others his status as a German immigrant
who had realized the American Dream, he spent large sums of money as a matter
of custom. To arrive at his domestic destinations, he commissioned the Adolphus, a special rail car that was
lavishly paneled, carpeted, and decorated with little regard for cost. Invariably,
Busch wore the finest European crafted and tailored clothing; for his wife he
purchased jewelry the likes of which few women in St. Louis high society
possessed.

The
Busch residences further demonstrated the many rewards of success reaped by
Adolphus. While in St. Louis, the Busches made use of no fewer than three
homes. Number One Busch Place, the former Anheuser family property, was the
showplace of the group. As the primary estate, the brick-and-stone mansion stood
out to casual passers-by and was decorated lavishly to maximize the impression of
grandeur it made on visitors. The interior featured huge crystal chandeliers,
parquet floors and stained glass windows, a treasure trove of antiques, and works
of art from a wide range of American, German, and French artists. Number Two
and Number Three Busch Place were built for the Busch children as they grew
older and had families of their own, the former becoming the primary residence
of August A. Busch as the most direct heir to Adolphus and the leadership of
the brewery.[47]

After
years of enduring the cold winters and harsh summers of St. Louis, Busch took
ownership of estates in Pasadena, California; Cooperstown, New York; and Bad
Schwalbach, Germany, where he constructed an expansive residence named Villa
Lilly, after his wife. Combined with a rustic lodge, the Waldfriede, and expansive hunting grounds, the Villa Lilly added
1,200 acres of land to the Busch empire. From 1886 onward Adolphus made a habit
of spending most of the winter with his family in Pasadena, where he had
acquired the mansion of tobacco magnate George S. Myers and renamed it Ivy
Hall. He also had another home there, the Blossoms, which was reserved for
visiting friends and otherwise for family members. The Blossoms alone cost
$165,000 (approximately $3.95 million in 2010); from 1892 to 1897 Busch spent a
half-million dollars (approximately $13.6 million) to transform the property
through the addition of a series of gardens that eventually spanned thirty-five
acres and included a variety of botanical treasures, fountains, and terraces
whose maintenance required fifty employees.[48]

With
his personal wealth assured through the brewery’s longtime prosperity, Busch
increasingly sought to engage in charitable activity, embracing an ethic of
giving back to the community that had given him the opportunity to earn his
fortune.[49] Frequently,
Adolphus gave $1,000 to $5,000 gifts (2010 value: $23,676 to $118,382) to
orphanages, hospitals, and relief societies, in St. Louis and elsewhere,
including an annual $5,000 contribution to the House of the Good Shepherd every
Groundhog Day. Busch regularly donated money to German-American causes, both in
honor of his immigrant heritage and as a show of solidarity with the community
and its core values. In 1910, Busch donated $5,000 toward the construction of a
monument to Franz Daniel Pastorius, the founder of Germantown, Pennsylvania,
the first permanent German settlement in America. The gesture stood out among
the lagging donations by other magnates, prompting one journal at the time to
ask, “Is there really only a single Adolphus Busch among the thousands of
wealthy German-Americans?” [“Gibt es denn
wirklich nur einen einzigen Adolphus Busch unter den Tausenden von wohlhabenden
Deutschamerikanern?“].[50] In late 1911, Adolphus gave $5,000 (approximately
$118,000 in 2010) to the German-American Teacher’s College in Milwaukee, describing
the gift in a letter as a demonstration of his desire for greater awareness of
what “the German element” had contributed to American culture:

Whilst
congratulating you on this endeavor, allow me to say that I hold it to be a
sheer obligation of honor for the German element in the United States to
support you in this effort and to open both heart and soul for the continuance
and improvement of that wonderful educational institution. … I’ve always been
convinced that the Milwaukee Teacher’s Seminar is a true spiritual arsenal for
such battles and is therefore, alongside the great German-American Alliance,
one of the most distinguished means of preservation of the German element and
German cultural values in America.[Indem ich Sie zu diesem Unternehmen beglückwünsche, gestatten Sie mir
zu sagen, dass ich es geradezu für eine Ehrenpflicht des Deutschtums der
Vereinigten Staaten halte, Sie darin zu unterstützen und für den Fortbestand
und die Vervollkommnung jenes herrlichen Bildungsinstituts Herz und Hand zu
öffnen. ... ich war stets der Überzeugung, dass das Milwaukeer Lehrerseminar
ein wahres geistiges Arsenal für solche Kämpfe und daher, neben dem grossen
Deutschamerikanischen Nationalbund, eines der vornehmsten Mittel ist zur
Erhaltung des Deutschtums und deutscher Kulturwerte in Amerika.][51]

In
extraordinary cases, Busch went well above and beyond anticipated levels of giving.
When a major earthquake devastated San Francisco in 1906, he pledged $100,000 ($2.5
million in 2010) – $50,000 personally and another $50,000 on behalf of the
brewery – to help victims, a precedent that the company followed for decades to
come through monetary contributions and the distribution of supplies, most
notably thousands of cases of brewery-packaged drinking water, to places affected
by similar crises.[52] Institutions
of learning also benefitted from Busch’s generosity, most prominently Washington
University in St. Louis, whose medical school was started with $850,000 (2010
value: $20.1 million) given in the name of Robert Barnes, the bank president
who had provided the loan needed for Adolphus to expand the brewery back in the
1860s.[53]
At the turn of the twentieth century, Busch gave an additional $100,000 (2010
value: $2.68 million) to the university for the construction of the Busch
Chemical Laboratory, a Tudor Gothic edifice made of Missouri granite and
Bedford limestone that one contemporary observer described as “an enduring
monument to the liberality of Mr. Busch.”[54] Adolphus
also partook in the kind of civic involvement that was common among wealthy
German-American entrepreneurs of the period. After St. Louis received the
distinction of hosting the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, he was offered,
and accepted, the position of director of the World’s Fair, a role he fulfilled
until his resignation in November 1904.[55] In
1913, Busch served as the honorary president of the seventh convention of the
National German-American Alliance, held in St. Louis that year, and oversaw its
centenary celebration of the Battle of Leipzig (also known as the Battle of the
Nations), which had led to the defeat of Napoleon and his eventual abdication
and exile.[56]

True
to German-American tradition, Busch was an active supporter of fine arts
institutions. Local engagement included help in “most generously” underwriting a
summer loan exhibition of paintings by both American and foreign masters at the
St. Louis City Art Museum in 1911. On a national level, Busch donated money as
well as works of art, such as Heinrich Zügel’s painting Oxen Going through the Water, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York. By the spring of 1909, the painting had become one of the most
popular pieces in the museum’s permanent exhibition of contemporary art.[57]
In 1911 and 1912, he donated $350,000 (2010 value: $8.12 million) to help fund
the construction and maintenance of the Germanic Museum on the campus of
Harvard University. He made the gift in the hopes of creating a museum that would
spur the establishment of comparable institutions at universities in other
cities.[58] Today,
the museum houses an extraordinary collection of art from German-speaking
Europe, and is known as the Busch-Reisinger Museum.

In
one particular case, Busch’s private love for the visual arts spilled over into
his professional life, where it ultimately reached and influenced countless
millions of beer consumers. In the early 1890s, Busch spent $35,000 (approximately
$875,240 in 2010) to acquire a painting that he greatly admired, Custer’s Last Fight by Cassilly Adams.
At the time, the painting hung on the wall of a St. Louis saloon. The American-Indian
motif resonated with Adolphus, as it did with many German immigrants, some of whom
had developed a fascination with Native Americans, the Wild West, and frontier
life back in their homeland.[59] Busch
was so moved by the painting that he commissioned a local artist to recreate
the work with additional details and then arranged for the new version to be
lithographed for widespread distribution. It proved to be the most successful promotion
launched by Anheuser-Busch in its pre-Prohibition marketing efforts.[60] In
1896 – the same year that Anheuser-Busch introduced the enduring Michelob brand[61] –
it placed thousands of copies of the Custer image in strategic retail accounts;
in subsequent decades, the brewery printed over a million copies of the image,
making it one of the most widespread art images ever used for commercial purposes
and what Time magazine later called
“at the turn of the century, the most famous painting in the U.S.”[62]

At
the dawn of the twentieth century, Adolphus Busch could look back on a legacy
of accomplishment rivaled by few German-American entrepreneurs, and even fewer
members of the industry in which he had become an unquestioned pioneer and leader.
In 1901, production at the St. Louis brewery surpassed the one million
barrels-per-year mark, and Anheuser-Busch overtook Schlitz as the largest beer
producer in volume in the United States.[63] Not
content to rest upon his laurels, and eager to keep pace with rapidly
increasing demand, Busch authorized a $1.2 million (approximately $30.7 million
in 2010) expansion of the facility in 1905 through the construction of a
seven-story stock house. In 1906, Anheuser-Busch reached the 1.5 million barrel
production mark, and in 1907, with an insured value of $6 million (approximately
$143.6 million in 2010), the improved brewery complex was capable of producing at
least 1.6 million barrels of beer per year, of which 560,000 barrels alone – some
173 million bottles – were bottled Budweiser for external markets.[64]

As
the nineteenth century had drawn to a close, Busch had turned his attention to
the threat of prohibition legislation, which was gradually making inroads
across the nation at the local and state levels and was threatening established
brewery markets.[65]
As early as 1908, the brewery marketed Bevo, a non-alcoholic brew designed to
maintain an Anheuser-Busch presence in dry zones and hedge bets against the
possible suspension of standard beer sales nationwide. In 1910, Busch made
clear his personal belief that the dry movement was a misguided venture that
was out of keeping with the German virtues long demonstrated by both brewers
and their product:

The meanest thing in the world is prohibition. If given full swing it
would ruin the world. It is a maker of hypocrisy and a destroyer of moderation.
We want moderation in everything. In Germany every one drinks, but it is done
in moderation, and Germans are a remarkably healthy race. We want the high
license and the regulation of the saloon. I do not mean to say that all those
who preach prohibition are hypocrites. They mean well, but are on the wrong track.[66]

Transition
at the company was not limited to its product line. Son August A. Busch, Sr., groomed
as the eventual successor to the presidency, had begun working at the brewery
in the 1880s as an apprentice and then as a scale clerk before rising to a position
of leadership a decade later, assuming pro
tempore command of the operation in place of his father during the out-of-town
trips that Adolphus took with greater frequency.[67]

In the
spring of 1911, Adolphus and Lilly hosted a lavish ceremony in California to celebrate
their fiftieth wedding anniversary, an occasion deemed important enough to give
brewery employees in St. Louis a day off from work and each of the Busch
children a new home. Congratulations came from around the world, with the
well-wishers including current U.S. president William Howard Taft, former
president U.S. Theodore Roosevelt, and German emperor Wilhelm II.[68] It
turned out to be one of the last high-profile events that Adolphus ever hosted,
as the stress of prohibitionist gains seemingly exacerbated a general health
decline that had been brought on by advancing years. By 1910, Busch had begun to
pursue a more reclusive lifestyle, and was said to be “surrounded by doctors,
nurses and guardians and never permitted to be seen at close range.”[69] Despite
his fading strength, political activity still occupied a good bit of Busch’s time
during his last years. This included a personal visit with Roosevelt and opposition
during the electoral campaign of 1912 to the candidacy of Democrat Woodrow
Wilson, a man he dismissed in private correspondence with the following comment: “I
have a kind of feeling that the fellow is a prohibitionist and that he is
leaning that way and therefore all the German orators, all the liberal men
ought to accuse him of [being] an enemy to personal freedom.”[70]

In
May 1913, Busch returned to St. Louis, but owing to his fragile health and his
inability to stand or walk without assistance, his homecoming was muted compared
with his previous, more celebrated arrivals. Still, Adolphus remained sharp
mentally and focused on both personal responsibilities to family and professional
obligations at the brewery. On June 9, 1913, he departed New York and sailed
with his family to Germany for the last time. There, he engaged in hunting, albeit
with help from a trusted personal assistant, corresponded extensively with
friends and family, and monitored the rising tide of prohibition legislation back
at home, remaining in regular contact via letter and telegraph with trusted
associates on business matters. In September of that year, Adolphus accepted an
award for his charitable contributions to the German people from Phillip, Duke
of Hesse. Otherwise, he began to curtail many of his activities (aside from
stag hunting) due to recurring feelings of illness. In early October, Busch was
taken home from hunting after complaining of discomfort, and fluid was removed
from his lungs. On October 10, 1913, Adolphus apparently attended to fifteen
letters on his desk at Villa Lilly, smoked a cigar, and chatted freely and
cheerfully with family members. By evening, Busch went to bed as usual. At
approximately 8:15 p.m., he died in his sleep of what was officially reported
as heart disease, though a later biography concluded that cirrhosis of the
liver contributed to his death.[71]

In
keeping with his grandiose lifestyle, the passing of Adolphus Busch occasioned
one of the most extravagant funeral ceremonies of the century and demonstrated
the totality of his impact on nearly all whom he had touched over the previous
half-century. After being transported in a private rail car to port in Bremen,
his body was brought back to the United States aboard his favorite steamship,
the Kronprinz Wilhelm, and was then
taken by a specially-chartered train – which included his private car, the Adolphus – to St. Louis for burial. One
hundred hotel rooms were reserved for out-of-town guests, 180 honorary pallbearers
were named, and mourners included the presidents of Harvard, the University of
California, and the University of Missouri, numerous business and industrial
leaders, and at least one major rival for the title of owner of the largest
brewery in the world: Colonel Gustav Pabst of Milwaukee. Five thousand
Anheuser-Busch employees attended a final viewing of their boss at the Busch
mansion the day before the funeral, and when the home was opened to the public,
some 30,000 additional individuals came to pay tribute. The city of St. Louis
formally shut down for five minutes in honor of Busch: all business was suspended,
power to the street cars was turned off, and factories came to a halt.
Throughout the nation, memorial services were held in cities with
Anheuser-Busch branch offices, most notably in Dallas, where the Adolphus Hotel
– bought by the beer baron and renovated in 1912 for the unprecedented sum of
$2.5 million (approximately $58 million in 2010) – hosted 300 people and played
the same music that had been heard at the service in St. Louis. The funeral
itself, held at the Busch mansion, was presided over by notable figures such as
Baron Friedherr von Lesner, the attaché of the German Embassy in Washington; at
the end, the casket was placed upon a truck for a final trip around the
brewery, where some 25,000 people stood outside its iron gates to glimpse the
proceedings. The final procession, to Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis,
followed a well-publicized route with as many as 100,000 spectators lining up
to pay tribute.[72]

The
legacy of Adolphus Busch continued to be felt for decades to come, as Anheuser-Busch
consolidated its status as the largest brewer in America, and as Budweiser grew
to become the best-selling brand of beer in the world. August A. Busch, Sr.,
guided the firm through the difficult years of World War I and Prohibition
until he committed suicide in February 1934 on account of extensive health
problems; grandson Adolphus Busch III (born 1891) successfully navigated the
choppy waters of the remainder of the Great Depression and World War II before
dying of cancer in August 1946.[73] Another
grandson, August A. (Gussie) Busch, Jr. (1899-1989), saw the company through much
of its golden era of growth, taking the firm from a single-site entity to one
with nine separate breweries nationwide and aggregate beer sales of 26,522,000
barrels by 1973. In 1964, under his leadership, production at the St. Louis
facility alone reached the ten million barrels-per-year mark. After alternating
with Pabst and Schlitz as the largest brewer in the nation in the first two
decades after the repeal of Prohibition, Anheuser-Busch seized the top spot for
good in 1957, and remained the number one U.S. brewer until the present.[74] In
1997, its worldwide sales volume surpassed the 100 million barrel mark for the
first time, and in 2003 the company peaked in U.S. market share at 49.8 percent;
virtually one of every two beers sold in the United States was brewed by
Anheuser-Busch. Ultimately, the sustained success of the business made it an
attractive target for takeover, and in 2008 the multinational brewing conglomerate
InBev acquired Anheuser-Busch with shareholder approval, based on an all-cash
offer of $70.00 per share of stock that represented a total value of $52
billion.[75] The
move, which put an end to Busch family control of the business, came 143 years
after Adolphus acquired his initial stake in a struggling St. Louis brewery and
set it on a path to becoming the largest and most successful brewing entity in
American history.

[3] The current and
subsequent figures citing 2010 dollar values relative to the original money
amount have been calculated in terms of the annual Consumer Price Index for the
United States, via MeasuringWorth accessed February 20, 2012).

[4]St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 11,
1913, as cited in Krebs and Orthwein, Making
Friends Is Our Business, 78.

[5] August A. Busch,
Busch family history, dated July 25, 1940, in the Missouri Historical Society,
as cited in Peter Hernon and Terry Ganey, Under the Influence: The Unauthorized Story
of the Anheuser-Busch Dynasty (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1991),
20.

[7] A decade later, on
February 19, 1867, Busch renounced his allegiance to the Grand Duke of
Hesse-Darmstadt and became a United States citizen.

[8] Hernon and Ganey, Under the Influence, 23, 31. Over the
years, Adolphus Busch and the Busch family proudly maintained numerous
hallmarks of their heritage. For instance, the family frequently used the
German language in private and social settings, and Adolphus proved unwilling
to alter or minimize his thick German accent. Moreover, the family offered
financial and other support to German-American organizations and charities
based in St. Louis and elsewhere. They also collected artwork by German
masters, made regular trips back to and around German-speaking Europe, and
consumed German foods and beverages, most notably German white wines from the
Moselle and Rhine regions. See Hernon and Ganey, Under the Influence, 47-49.

[13] Robert J.
Rombauer, The Union Cause in St. Louis in
1861 (St. Louis, MO: St. Louis Municipal Centennial Year, 1909), 441-45, as
cited in Hernon and Ganey, Under the
Influence, 27.

[14] Busch family
history by August A. Busch, Jr., Missouri Historical Society, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 22, 1905,
as cited in Hernon and Ganey, Under the
Influence, 28, 32.

[15] In the case of the
Bavarian Brewery, E. Anheuser & Co., the “Company” was in fact William
D’Oench, as a silent partner. In the years after D’Oench sold his share in the
brewery to Adolphus Busch, the latter was fond of reminding him what he had
given up on. Similarly, Busch liked to emphasize how the brewery had been
transformed under his leadership. For instance, in 1899, Busch wrote the
following lines to D’Oench in a piece of private correspondence: “I wish we
might have the pleasure of seeing you here in St. Louis again, so we could have
the opportunity of showing you the greatest and largest brewery in America, in
which you were once half owner. … Now do you recollect what I paid you for your
half interest?” See Adolphus Busch to William D’Oench, personal correspondence,
Charles Sitton Collection, as cited in Hernon and Ganey, Under the Influence, 28; and Herbst, Roussin, and Kious, St. Louis Brews, 32.

[16] Gerald Holland,
“The King of Beer,” American Mercury
Magazine, October 1929, as cited in Hernon and Ganey, Under the Influence, 29.

[17] Adolphus Busch,
correspondence with Charles Nagel, December 8, 1909, as cited in Hernon and
Ganey, Under the Influence, 29.

[18] Insight into the
challenges that Busch confronted in building up the small Anheuser/D’Oench
brewery can be gleaned from statistical data from the period. According to a
May 30, 1860, report by the Daily
Missouri Republican, just before Eberhard Anheuser purchased the Bavarian
Brewery it ranked only twenty-ninth out of forty operational breweries in the
city, with a meager output of 3,200 barrels per year (cited in Herbst, Roussin,
and Kious, St. Louis Brews, 9).

[20] An 1878
descriptive account revealed the extent to which Busch decorated the brewery
offices generally, and his own specifically, in an effort to leave visitors
with a profound impression of success and prosperity: “The office is one of the
finest and most tastefully appointed of any in the city, and bears the
characteristics of the president’s office of a large bank. It is Gothic in the
exterior, with small Doric Sky-lights and modern windows, and antique
decorations. The floor is of tessellated marble, and the furniture is of the
most exquisite workmanship, and elegantly veneered. The private office of Mr.
Adolphus Busch, the Secretary and Manager of the Association, is simply
sumptuous, with its beautifully designed and immaculate marble mantel,
Axminster carpets, ornamented French plate glass, luxurious chairs, elegant
paintings, etc. In addition to its
handsome appointment, the office is provided with every possible convenience,
including a large iron vault for valuables, lavatories, toilet rooms, etc.,
with an arrangement for expediting business unsurpassed.” See “75 Years Ago …
In Spirit the Same Today,” Brewers Digest
(September 1952), 70.

[21] Hernon and Ganey, Under the Influence, 30-31. See also
Stevens, Eleven Roads to Success, 26.

[22] In subsequent
years, Anheuser-Busch advertisements stressed the company’s role as the first
brewery in America to introduce pasteurized bottled beer. Under the slogan “Not
How Cheap but How Good,” advertisements also emphasized various attributes of
the company’s brews. With regard to product quality, specific emphasis was
placed on the absence of corn as a fermentable article. With the typical
hyperbole of the era, one company advertisement of the 1890s maintained that
“the difference between corn beer and fine barley-malt beer is the difference
between corn bread and fine white bread. … Of corn beer you can drink but
little without a protest from the stomach, and the effect is a loss of energy,
weariness, stupidity, and drowsiness. The barley-malt beer, however, is a
sparkly, spunky, healthy, quickly assimilating drink, with a body and a character
smacking and vigorous. Its effect is buoyant, refreshing, and invigorating. ANHEUSER-BUSCH
brands are absolutely free from corn or corn preparation. Nothing but highest grade malt and hops are
used in its preparation.” See “Anheuser-Busch Brewing Ass’n, St. Louis, Mo.,
U.S.A., Brewers of Fine Beer Exclusively” (advertisement), in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, November
17, 1892, 353.

[23] Hernon and Ganey, Under the Influence, 32; Herbst,
Roussin, and Kious, St. Louis Brews,
34; Stanley Baron, Brewed in America: The
History of Beer and Ale in the United States (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and
Company, 1962), 59, 242-46. The fact that beer production rose seventeen
percent from 1876 to 1877 suggests that Anheuser-Busch rail shipments of beer
to locations outside of St. Louis had a big impact on the company. See “75
Years Ago … In Spirit the Same Today,” Brewers
Digest (September 1952), 63. While Adolphus Busch was by no means the first
brewer to bottle beer, he is widely recognized as the first American brewer to
do most of his own bottling. The more standard practice of the day was to keg
draft beer and ship it to external markets, where local bottlers poured the
beer into glass bottles and, when applicable, labeled them before sending them
off for distribution and retail sale.

[25] Krebs and Orthwein, Making Friends Is Our Business, 33; Hernon
and Ganey, Under the Influence, 33.

[26] J.A. Dacus and
James W. Buel, A Tour of St. Louis
(St. Louis, MO: Western Publishing Co., 1878), as cited in “75 Years Ago … In
Spirit the Same Today,” Brewers Digest
(September 1952), 71. The fulsome praise heaped upon Adolphus Busch in the
original publication was typical of the era; flattering portrayals of
successful business magnates were often penned by writers and editors with financial
interests in the success of various firm. Occasionally, such copy was even
provided by the firms themselves, as a paid promotional effort to craft its
image within the local community.

[27] Edwin Kalbfleish,
“Anheuser-Busch Financial History,” September 18, 1951, Charles Sitton
Collection, as cited in Hernon and Ganey, Under
the Influence, 33; Krebs and Orthwein, Making
Friends Is Our Business, 20. In subsequent years, Adolphus and Lilly Busch
consolidated their control over the business by acquiring as much stock as they
could, sometimes going to considerable lengths to do so: in one case, for
instance, they paid a family member $60,000 for a single share. Ultimately,
Busch was able to increase his stake in the business from 238 to 267 shares,
while Lilly boosted her holdings from 100 to 116. See Maxine Sylvia Sandberg,
“The Life and Career of Adolphus Busch,” Master’s thesis, University of Texas,
1952, 68, as cited in Hernon and Ganey, Under
the Influence, 34.

[28] William J.
Vollmar, Budweiser: The Early Years
(St. Louis, MO: Anheuser-Busch Division of Corporate Marketing and
Communications, n.d.), 3; Hernon and Ganey, Under
the Influence, 34.

[29] In the parlance of
the times, “export” shipments were those of beer sent to markets outside of the
customary sales range of the brewery on a local or regional basis, but not
necessarily to foreign nations or territories. Such markets for Anheuser-Busch
during the mid- to late- nineteenth century included Texas and New Orleans to
the south, San Francisco to the west, and New York and Philadelphia to the east,
among others. Over time, Anheuser-Busch successfully extended its market
presence abroad as well – by 1895, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, and England were
among those countries receiving regular shipments of Budweiser beer. See Krebs
and Orthwein, Making Friends Is Our
Business, 33.

[30] Vollmar, Budweiser: The Early Years, 4. See also
Herbst, Roussin, and Kious, St. Louis
Brews, 37.

[31] The concept of
brand marketing is understood much differently today than it was in the years
prior to Prohibition, when the product line of a given brewery was defined by the
style of the brew – such as Kulmbacher, Wiener, Bohemian, Pilsener, Dortmunder,
and of course Budweiser – rather than by a specific name. Only in the
post-Prohibition era did the concept of distinct product names emerge for the
various beers and ales made by American breweries. In the case of
Anheuser-Busch, Budweiser output was augmented during the first fifty years
after repeal by the introduction of the popular brands Michelob and Michelob
Light, Busch, and Anheuser-Busch Natural Light (later simply Natural Light).
Additionally, there were also line extensions of the Budweiser name, including
Budweiser Bock, Budweiser Malt Liquor, and Budweiser (Bud) Light, as well as
later (and occasionally short-lived) entries such as Bud Dry, Bud Ice,
Budweiser Select, and Budweiser American Ale.

[32] Cited in Vollmar, Budweiser: The Early Years, 6. In 1878, Carl
Conrad trademarked the Budweiser name under the auspices of his work as an
importer of wines and liquors. Although Busch obtained the American trademark for
Budweiser in 1882, a conflict with the Czechoslovakian brewer of Budweiser over
production and distribution rights in Europe persisted well into the twentieth
century. See Hernon and Ganey, Under the
Influence, 38, for a concise overview of the legal issues involved in the
dispute up to 1991. For years, Budweiser was understood as a style of beer
rather than a brand name; and for this reason, there were numerous brews with
this moniker on the market in the United States in the pre-Prohibition era,
most notably one by Busch’s Milwaukee-based archrival Schlitz. The vast
majority of these failed to endure the dry years, and after repeal only one
such beer – DuBois Budweiser, brewed by the tiny DuBois Brewing Company of
DuBois, Pennsylvania – survived legal challenges from Anheuser-Busch and lasted
into the modern era, at least until September 30, 1970, when a judge brought a
sixty-five-year legal battle between the two firms to an end with an
exclusivity ruling in favor of the St. Louis corporation. See “Budweiser Trade
Name Fight Ended,” Greeley Daily Tribune,
October 1, 1970, 23.

[33] Although Budweiser
was the flagship beer of Anheuser-Busch for over a century, it is interesting
to note that, unlike some other Anheuser-Busch brews, it was never advertised
with a specific emphasis on its St. Louis origins. This suggests that it was
always intended more for national and international distribution than local
consumption. In fact, by the 1880s, the Budweiser brand had replaced another
beer, St. Louis Lager, as the brewery’s principle product. The replacement was
made in recognition of Budweiser’s initial sales success, but also in the
knowledge that a generically-named beverage like St. Louis Lager could be made
by any St. Louis brewer. This being the case, it lacked the distinctiveness
that Adolphus Busch needed to realize his goals of widespread brand name
recognition for the brewery in external markets. See Herbst, Roussin, and Kious, St. Louis Brews, 37.

[35] Hernon and Ganey, Under the Influence, 37. The bankruptcy
forced Conrad from his business as a distributor, but his close personal
relationship with Adolphus Busch guaranteed his employment at the
Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association for the next four decades, until his death
in 1922. See also Hernon and Ganey, Under
the Influence, 37.

[36] Although total
Anheuser-Busch market share nationwide only stood at around four percent during
the period immediately before Prohibition, the rapid growth of the firm (and
the Budweiser label) set it apart from other brewing operations of the day. From
1875 to 1880, roughly the period when Anheuser-Busch began making Budweiser and
saw company production grow almost sixfold to well over 100,000 barrels per
year, beer output nationwide rose by only 28.6 percent, with the average
brewery growing from just 3,414 barrels manufactured (1875) to 4,852 (1880). The
small market share for Anheuser-Busch beers generally and Budweiser specifically
is best explained by the total output of the large number of competing
breweries scattered across the country at that time. The number thereof – despite
being in slight decline, from 2,783 (1875) to 2,741 (1880) – still dwarfed the
number a century later. For instance, in 1980, near the peak of Anheuser-Busch’s
market dominance, just 101 breweries, under the control of forty-nine different
firms, operated nationwide. See United States Brewers Association, 1979 Brewers Almanac, as cited in Stack,A Concise History of America’s Brewing
Industry.

[37] Herbst, Roussin,
and Kious, St. Louis Brews, 37. Over
the years, there have been many interpretations of the “A and Eagle” logo, but
according to a 1954 company account by Eberhard Anheuser, chairman of the board
and grandson of the original partner in the firm, the “A” in the corporate
emblem represents Anheuser and the eagle “symbolizes Adolphus Busch, whose
vision knew no horizon!” The account holds that the insignia was used for the
first time in 1872 and formally trademarked in 1877. It remains a cornerstone
of Anheuser-Busch advertising to this day. See “In the Anheuser-Busch
Tradition: The ‘A and Eagle,’” Budcaster
3.3 (March 1954), 7, 22; “Protection of Our Trademarks,” Budcaster 8.8 (August-September 1959), 6; and “Trade Marks:
Protectors of Quality,” Budcaster 7.3
(Fall 1970), 12-13.

[38] Vollmar, Budweiser: The Early Years, 8. The
familiarity of Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser nationally gave rise to marketing
efforts by others who sought to take advantage of the established names.
Perhaps the most prominent pre-Prohibition reference to the company came in
1903, when Tin Pan Alley songwriters Harry von Tilzer and Andrew B. Sterling
composed “Under the Anheuser Bush,” a waltz that gained popular acclaim and was
adopted by the brewery for the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. During the
duration of the fair, the company distributed sheet music of the song along
with an invitation for visitors to tour the brewery. In 1907, another
company-inspired song, “Budweiser’s a Friend of Mine,” was penned by Vincent
Bryan and Seymour Furth, but it did not garner the same level of public recognition.
Biographies of Tilzer and Sterling, and references to their other works, can be
found in “Under the Anheuser Bush,” Budcaster
3.9 (September 1954), 3-4.

[39] A rough estimate
of how much money Anheuser-Busch designated for advertising on Budweiser
specifically, and to sustain its growth strategy generally, can perhaps be
gleaned from the advertising expenditures of the Pabst Brewing Company, a firm
of comparable size and market ambition. From 1891 to 1893, Pabst spent $403,408
to promote its brews – a figure that “probably was large even for a
ten-million-dollar corporation selling in one of the most highly competitive
markets” – including a record $162,414.94 in 1891. The figure, which
represented a twenty-eight percent increase over any preceding year, was
credited with leading directly to a 263,294 barrel growth in Pabst sales. It
also provided one of the earliest direct correlations between massive national
marketing campaigns and increasing beer sales. For a detailed overview of Pabst’s
advertising expenditures and strategies, see Thomas Cochran, The Pabst Brewing Company: The History of an
American Business (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1948), 129-146.

[40] Contemporary
sources corroborate the idea that St. Louis’ German-American brewers enjoyed cordial
relations, seeing each other as friendly competitors both personally and
professionally – a situation that resulted, in no small measure, from their
shared ethnic and immigrant bonds. At the same time, however, these sources also
indicate that local rival firms were often unable to compete with the steadily
increasing sales figures posted by Anheuser-Busch. Among St. Louis brewers,
only the Lemp Western Brewery was able to match the early growth of the E.
Anheuser Co.’s Brewing Association: in 1877, it registered the production of
61,299 barrels of beer, compared to the 44,961 barrels logged by Anheuser-Busch,
which claimed second place in the city. See Herbst, Roussin, and Kious, St. Louis Brews, 12, for a list of the
largest operating breweries in St. Louis for 1877, as culled from the trade
publication The Western Brewer.

[41] Hernon and Ganey, Under the Influence, 40-41. While
Adolphus had considerable success in influencing beer prices in conjunction
with his competitors, he was not always able to secure a desirable outcome. In
early 1895, Anheuser-Busch, the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company of Milwaukee,
and the United Breweries of Davenport, made an attempt to manipulate the market
in Davenport, Iowa. Schlitz proposed raising the price per barrel from $6.00 to
$7.00 if Anheuser-Busch and United Breweries followed suit. When they failed to
reach a consensus, a price war broke out that quickly lowered the cost per
barrel to only $4.00. See “Notes From
Home and Abroad,” The American Brewer
28.3 (March 1895), 124.

[42] The Lone Star
Brewery Operation that was partly owned by Adolphus Busch should not be
confused with the Lone Star Brewing Company that operated in the same city after
the repeal of Prohibition. The latter firm opened under independent ownership
in 1940 and produced several different brews, including its flagship Lone Star
Beer, under different corporate owners until it closed in 1996, shortly after
being acquired by the Stroh Brewing Company.

[45] While on the
national level rival producers such as Pabst and Schlitz exhibited comparable
growth during the period, it was not uncommon for large brewers to actually lose
market share –as did Anheuser-Busch, during the period 1895 to 1915 – due to
the increasing number of breweries nationwide; their rapid technological
advancement and growing efficiency and higher barrelage as a result of such
progress; and periods of economic stagnation, such as during the 1890s, when a
pronounced recession drove down production figures in St. Louis, Cincinnati, and
other cities with a large number of competing breweries. Above and beyond the
market share loss demonstrated by Anheuser-Busch, from 1889 to 1894, the
barrelage of St. Louis Breweries, Ltd., a syndicate of British-owned brewers in
the city, fell from 775,936 to 694,623 in total, and 11.4 percent from 1893 to
1894 specifically. See “The Syndicate Breweries of America,” The American Brewer 28.2 (February
1895), 60. For a more extensive discussion of the factors influencing beer production
and market share, particularly during the 1890s, see Timothy J. Holian, Over the Barrel: The Brewing History and
Beer Culture of Cincinnati, Volume One, 1800-Prohibition (St. Joseph, MO:
Sudhaus Press, 2000), 207-12.

[46] Production figures
for the period are cited in Herbst, Roussin, and Kious, St. Louis Brews, 36; Krebs and Orthwein, Making Friends Is Our Business, 22; Jack S. Blocker, Jr., David M.
Fahey, and Ian R. Tyrell, Alcohol and
Temperance in Modern History: A Global Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA:
ABC-CLIO, 2003), 44; and “75 Years Ago … In Spirit the Same Today,” Brewers Digest (September 1952), 71. The
title of largest brewer in the world shifted several times during the 1880s and
1890s. For instance, whereas Anheuser-Busch held the leading position in 1887,
by the end of 1891 the Pabst Brewing Company had assumed the crown, with a
production level of 790,290 barrels. See “Pabst Brewing Co., the Largest Beer
Brewery in the World,” (advertisement), in Frank
Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, May 19, 1892, 276.

[47] Hernon and Ganey, Under the Influence, 45. Number One
Busch Place was torn down in 1929, one year after the death of Lilly Busch, and
is now the site of a lagering cellar in the service of the brewery. Adolphus
Busch’s private art collection included works by American artists (Browne,
Bellows, Chase, Hitchcock, Lawson, Metcalf, Schofield, Sargent, Winslow Homer,
and McNeill Whistler), German artists (Habermann, Hofmann, Kampf, Liebl,
Lenbach, Menzel, Schuch, Truebner, and Schram-Zittau), and French artists
(Boudin, Blanche, Degas, Harpignies, La Touche, Manet, Monet, Menard, and
Renoir). See Krebs and Orthwein, Making
Friends Is Our Business, 55, for a more extensive list.

[49] In addition to
charitable giving within the German-American community, Busch occasionally sent
money back to Germany to recognize his heritage and pay homage to his roots. In
one such case, Busch donated 50,000 German marks (approximately $12,500; 2010
value: $296,000) to the city of Mainz for unspecified distribution to needy individuals
and/or organizations. See “Personal Notes,” The
American Brewer 43.2 (February 1910), 81.

[51] “Umschau,” Monatshefte für deutsche
Sprache und Pädagogik 13.1 (January 1912), 24-25. Busch’s donation served to inspire other German-Americans
to support the Milwaukee project, including the City Federation of German
Societies of Evansville, Illinois, which proposed and passed a measure to take
up a collection for it “according to the example of Adolphus Busch in St.
Louis, with open arms and an open till” [nach
dem Muster von Adolphus Busch in St. Louis mit offenen Armen und offener Kasse].
See “Umschau,” Monatshefte für deutsche
Sprache und Pädagogik 13.2 (February 1912), 60.

[52] One such Anheuser-Busch
initiative occurred in 1960, when the company donated 6,000 quarts of
pasteurized Miami city drinking water to victims of Hurricane Donna, in the
Florida Keys, as well as for those who aided the cleanup effort. The water was
processed and packaged at the Regal Brewery in Miami, which was owned and
operated by Anheuser-Busch at the time. See “Regal Brewery Aids Hurricane Donna
Victims in Florida Keys,” Budcaster
9.10 (November 1960), 3; and “Regal Brewery’s ‘Operation Water’ Wins P.R.
Award,” Budcaster 10.5 (May 1961), 5.

[54] Edward H. Keiser,
“The Busch Chemical Library,” Science
13.320 (February 15, 1901), 261. The
Busch relationship with Washington University continued well into the future,
as demonstrated by the sizeable gift given by Anheuser-Busch toward the
construction of the Adolphus Busch III Laboratory of Biology. Dedicated on May
4, 1959, the facility served a new field of study at the school – molecular biology – and incorporated
up-to-date scientific equipment such that it became “an important meeting
ground where modern advances in chemistry and physics are focused on the
problem of finding out how living things work.” See Barry Commoner, “Adolphus
Busch III Laboratory Is Dedicated,” Budcaster
8.6 (June 1959), 4-5.

[59] This fascination
had been nurtured by a variety of sources, including letters from friends and
family members who had already immigrated to the United States, promotional
brochures that played up the unique aspects of American frontier life, and the
literary works of prominent German writers such as Karl May (1842-1912).

[60] The advertising
icon most commonly associated with Anheuser-Busch – the Budweiser Clydesdale
horse-and-wagon team – in fact was not
introduced until 1933, with the repeal of Prohibition. For an overview of the
early history of the Clydesdales and Anheuser-Busch, see “Budweiser’s Famous
‘Eight-Horse Hitch’,” Brewers Digest
27.5 (May 1952), 40-41.

[61] From the
beginning, Michelob was produced as a superior-quality, European-style lager
beer served on draft at selected retail accounts, although starting in late
1961 it also was packaged in bottles, and later still in cans, to make it more
accessible to the general public. The name of the product was chosen by
Adolphus Busch personally. Additional information on the Michelob brand can be
found in “The History of Michelob,” Budcaster
9.7 (July 1960), 5; and “Michelob Now Available in Bottles,” Budcaster 11.1 (January 1962), 13.

[62] Herbst, Roussin,
and Kious, St. Louis Brews, 38; “The
Baron of Beer,” Time 66.2 (July 11,
1955), 82. According to Time, the
lithographer who altered and reproduced the Adams work “redrew most of it,
adding dozens of new figures and buckets of gore (i.e., three dying soldiers
being scalped) to what was once a fairly restrained, stilted scene.” In
subsequent years, the original Adams painting met with an unpleasant fate. Donated
by Busch to the 7th U.S. Cavalry during the mid-1890s, it went lost
from around 1898 – when the group was dispatched to the Spanish-American War – until 1921, and was not recovered by the regiment
until 1934, when it was removed from storage and professionally restored by the
Works Progress Administration. On June
14, 1946, it was destroyed in a fire at the officers’ club at Fort Bliss, Texas.
See Peter Caswell, “The Bar Room Custer,” Military
Affairs 11.1 (Spring 1947), 51.

[64] Hernon and Ganey, Under the Influence, 56, 64-65; “75
Years Ago … In Spirit the Same Today,” Brewers
Digest (September 1952), 64.

[65] While the threat
of Prohibition was the foremost concern of Adolphus Busch in his last years of running
Anheuser-Busch, other problems arose as well: for instance, on April 27, 1910,
an extensive fire broke out at the St. Louis brewery, devastating bottling and
storage buildings on the property and causing over $500,000 (approximately $11.8
million in 2010) in damage. See “American Notes,” The American Brewer 43.5 (May 1910), 242. The prohibition movement
is best understood in this context as a reactionary nativist movement against
the German element and as an assertion of “American” values at their expense. The
largely German ethnic character of the late-nineteenth-century brewing industry
made it an easy target for such agitation; beginning primarily in rural areas
and spreading over time into urban settings, anti-alcohol forces linked
anti-foreign sentiment with both real (e.g., an increasingly immoral saloon
trade) and perceived vices in an attempt to gain traction for their agenda.
Their efforts culminated in the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, which
occurred in the wake of America’s entry into World War I against the Germans in
1917.

[67] The fact that
Adolphus Busch was in Europe for extended periods did not prevent him from
conducting brewery business as needed. Busch kept in frequent contact with St.
Louis via cable while abroad, sending instructions regarding important
decisions to his son and others. On average, this communication cost some $100
per day (approximate 2010 value: $2,368). See “75 Years Ago … In Spirit the
Same Today,” Brewers Digest
(September 1952), 63.

[68] Herbst, Roussin,
and Kious, St. Louis Brews, 39; Krebs
and Orthwein, Making Friends Is Our
Business, 67. A detailed overview of the opulent nature of the Busch’s
fiftieth anniversary celebration can be found in Hernon and Ganey, Under the Influence, 78-79.

[70] Adolphus Busch to
Charles Nagel, personal correspondence, July 3, 1912, Nagel Papers at the Yale
University Library, as cited in Hernon and Ganey, Under the Influence, 80.

[71]St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 11,
1913; October 12, 1913; and October 22, 1913; Dictionary of American Biography (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1943), 143, as cited in Hernon and Ganey, Under the Influence, 83-84.

[72] Extensive details
of the Busch funeral proceedings are available in Hernon and Ganey, Under the Influence, 85-86.

[73] The Busch tendency
to allocate large amounts of money to expand and modernize the St. Louis
brewery also continued in the early post-Prohibition era. Some $68 million (2010
value: approximately $824 million) was spent on new equipment and structures
for the St. Louis plant from 1933 to 1950, before a second Anheuser-Busch
facility, in Newark, NJ, was put into operation in 1951 to ease production and
shipping expense problems. See “The Brotherly Brewers,” Fortune 41.4 (April 1950), 180, 182.

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